The Unexpected Bat Mitzvah

Image

CreditCreditAnat Even Or

By Elizabeth Weil

Oct. 10, 2015

Last fall, on the eve of Rosh Hashana, my daughters, my husband and I ate dinner at my parents’ house. Baked chicken, green beans and chocolate cake. After, my parents rushed off to temple, as they do each Jewish New Year, and Dan, Hannah, Audrey and I headed across San Francisco, home.

I’m 46, but I still found the separation thrilling: My parents set the rules for their family. Dan and I set the rules for ours. It’s good to grow up and become the boss.

Dan and I had arrived that evening in separate cars, so Audrey, then 9, rode home with Dan, and Hannah, then 12, came with me. Usually, we split the other way. Audrey and I are contrarians: impatient, fond of blackjack, too proud to obey the rules. Hannah and Dan, by contrast, are totally comfortable, happy even, following recipes and athletic training protocols, established routes to glory.

But that night, as we left my parents’ apartment, Hannah held my arm. She had been needing more from me recently — not a confidant, exactly, but an enabler.

Just two weeks earlier, right before the start of sixth grade, she had asked me to take her to the hair salon, where, to my surprise, she cut her long blond hair into a bob. Afterward, on the sidewalk, she suggested that we drive downtown to buy her first bra.

“Mom?” she now said quietly. “I think I want to have a bat mitzvah.”

Whoa. Haircut and lingerie I could handle. Bat mitzvah? This was far off the family script. The Weil-Duane narrative, as we had plotted it, involved outsourcing religion: celebrating Jewish holidays with my family, Christian ones with Dan’s. Inside our nuclear family, we placed our faith in love, books, nature, generosity: the standard liberal, coastal stuff.

In the car, I let Hannah’s bat mitzvah request hang in the air a moment too long. She started crying.

“Wow, O.K., sweetie,” I finally said, not my most impressive parenting moment. “How long have you been thinking about this?”

“Since last spring, I guess.”

“You know, it’s a lot of work,” I said. “And you can’t do this just for the party.”

“I know,” she said.

“You’d be making a choice to be Jewish?”

Of course, she knew this, too.

I recently heard a Frenchwoman on the radio crying, saying she felt like a failure because her daughter had turned to God. I have to say, I could relate. A child feeling the pull of religion suggests the child is looking for something, something big and important that you as a parent are failing to provide, something to cope with the fact that the world into which you’ve brought this kid is gravely flawed.

When Dan and I got engaged, my parents didn’t balk. They, too, fell immediately in love with his literary California surfer charm. But they did ask how we intended to raise ethical children without religion.

The question struck me as antiquated then. It still does now. Ultraconservative Christians refusing to bake wedding cakes for gays, right-wing Jews in the occupied territories, Islamic extremist groups recruiting young women for jihad through the tactical use of kitten photos? Faith to me didn’t look like a moral fail-safe. Sometimes it seemed like a gateway vice, a sign of impending breakdown.

I told Dan about Hannah’s request as we walked into our gym, figuring he could work out his issues on the barbells or in the pool.

“She wants a bat mitzvah?” he asked, as we parted ways at the front desk. “Really? Didn’t you hate yours?”

I did, as he knew.

“Should we really let her pursue religion just because she’s 12 and she wants to?” he asked.

“Yeah?” I said.

Unsure, I next called my other spouse: my work wife, Taffy, whom I love. Our relationship consists of griping about editors and reading each other’s article drafts.

“Trust me, Liz, do it,” she said. Taffy is a practicing Jew. “You have to. If you make a big deal of it, guess what? She becomes Orthodox!”

Taffy was raised Orthodox, and she assured me that Orthodoxy would be a huge problem. As an adult, she had become less devout; not so her siblings. “I watched my sisters go quietly into that good night,” she told me on the phone. “Now they won’t eat at my house, which is fine. Whatever. I hate cooking anyway. But deny her now, and you end up with some collegiate exploration outside your auspices.”

A generation ago, Dan’s high school friends from Berkeley, Calif., challenged their lefty hippie parents by becoming investment bankers. Now, in our increasingly secular world, piousness is enjoying a moment as the ultimate good-girl rebellion. Exhibit A: Grace, the teenage daughter on “The Good Wife,” who joins a Bible study group and starts looking for solace in prayer, presumably to deal with her parents: a governor father who gets caught dabbling in prostitutes and drugs, and an increasingly power-hungry mother who, at least initially, stays with him regardless.

“Just do it and tell Dan it’s O.K.,” Taffy said, just before hanging up. “Tell him to wait until she’s an actual teenager, and she rejects you and loves him. Sunrise, sunset.”

Everybody had an opinion on what we should do. One of my closest friends, also in a mixed Christian-Jewish religion-free marriage, said: “You should go to Israel. You fly to Jerusalem, have a ceremony, bada bing, bada boom. Come home and you’re done.”

Another friend’s daughter was having a D.I.Y. bat mitzvah: no temple, just a Hebrew tutor. So I called, got the tutor’s contact information, and soon a woman with a thick Israeli accent was knocking on our door on Tuesday evenings. I’d hear her with Hannah in Hannah’s room saying, “Aleph, bet, gimel.” Which was fine, of course. Who could object to language education? But I started to worry that this, like an Israel trip, was not quite to the point, either.

Onward though the options. Conventional temple? No, thank you. This was Hannah’s journey, not ours. Then, we checked out the Kitchen, a self-identified religious start-up. (Ah, San Francisco.) The Kitchen happened to be holding a Sukkot dinner in Golden Gate Park. Perfect. I signed us up. Everybody, including us, arrived in Patagonia down sweaters, and the sukkah itself was beautiful: white lights woven through the tree-bough roof. We could have been in Tulum, Mexico.

For a lovely few hours, I was sure we had found the answer. Then we learned that for Hannah to be bat mitzvahed at the Kitchen, we had to attend Sabbath services a few times a month. Even if I took Hannah, and Dan stayed home with Audrey (who had zero interest in this), our family would be apart most Friday nights. We pushed on.

Then, at last, we met Arik, who had bar mitzvahed the son of a casual friend in a beach house with just a small group of friends and family standing around him, like an intimate wedding.

He didn’t work at a temple; he studied Judaism with people at his home. And as we sat on pillows in his book-lined office, we felt an instant rapport. For most of our hour together, Arik tuned in to Hannah. “So why do you want to get bat mitzvahed?” he asked.

“I guess because being both feels like being neither?” she said.

Arik nodded and smiled. They started studying together the next week.

I wish I could report that all my actions regarding Hannah’s bat mitzvah made perfect sense. Yet facing something truly important for which I’m unprepared — my oldest child insisting that we make room for her to have a life of her own, in our home — has made me feel anxious, almost obsolete. In one self-contradictory burst of enthusiasm, I decided that Dan and I should host a Passover Seder to show Hannah what Judaism might look like in our house.

I invited over a bunch of interfaith families, 18 guests in all, and bought for the occasion the “New American Haggadah,” edited by Jonathan Safran Foer with an introduction by Nathan Englander.

The event was a bust. Hannah spent the first half of it parsing the outfit of the lone 13-year-old girl in attendance. (Shorts over tights, with a billowy shirt that hung below the cuff of the shorts.) After the soup, Hannah leaned over and whispered, “When are people going home?”

I went to bed furious. What was that? Hannah, supposedly so drawn to religion, didn’t even care. The next morning, before we left on a spring-break camping trip, I met my mother for coffee. “Hannah paid zero attention to the Seder,” I said. “She didn’t want to bond at all.”

My mother’s lips curled in amusement. She didn’t need to say anything; it was so clear. Of course Hannah wasn’t interested in being religious the way that I was religious. She had already rejected that. The whole point was to create an individualized rite of passage, to build inside our family a specific, separate identity from me or Dan.

The next night, around the campfire, Audrey toasted marshmallows and made us gooey s’mores. She tried to hand one to her sister, but Hannah demurred. Instead, Hannah walked to the car and returned with her secret stash of Streit’s matzo. We all sat together as she made a matzo s’more.